


Solo Act

by TFLatte



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Episode 57 Spoilers, Gen, but at like 60 percent angst strength, griffin will pry that theory from my cold hands, kravitz is keetz, sibling relationships, they will be cold because i will have cried on them because he jossed my favorite theory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-27 02:00:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9945380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TFLatte/pseuds/TFLatte
Summary: Kravitz' big sister isn't used to being alone. Lydia's baby brother had to be.





	

**Author's Note:**

> me, immediately after the episode: damn this episode did nothing to support or refute kravkeetz. better start writing another fic while i still can

Lydia reforms deep in the Felicity Wilds with ash on her fingers.

Her form feels strange, crackling and jagged, and she can’t bring herself to rein it in. She’s never been alone in the world, she’s always had someone to back her up, always been a sister, and now-

Now she’s not.

She doesn’t remember a time before Edward – she was only a few years old when he was born, and even in her earliest memories they’d been inseparable. She doesn’t want to remember a time after Edward. A time after Keetz was bad enough.

She presses her fingertips together, the ash gritty between them, and clutches her hands to her chest under a sudden flood of grief. The energy sustaining her form flares again.

Lydia doesn’t know _how_ to be alone. She was always part of a set, Lydia and Edward, and then Lydia and Edward and Kravitz. At the end of the day, they’d always come back to each other. Even when their baby brother didn’t, when they had to be just Lydia and Edward again, they knew they would keep it that way, whatever they had to do to do it. But now – now Edward is nothing but a thin layer of dust already falling off her hands and she doesn’t know what to _do_.

She’s the oldest living thing in the material plane and she is utterly alone.

* * *

 

A single soul is darting around Kravitz as he struggles in the Astral Sea, and for the life of him he can’t tell why. The waves have driven all the souls he can sense deep below the surface, and he shares their unease. This one soul, though, won’t follow them, and the silver orb circles him frantically.

Kravitz does not have time for this.

Unfortunately, what he does have is a deep-seated sympathy for the frightened, lost souls his work often brings him to – not those that fought their fate, certainly, but their victims dragged back from their rightful peace, the ghosts, those who couldn’t quite understand that their time had come. It’s not much of a stretch to extend that to this panicked being.

Kravitz sighs. “It’s all right. Just follow the others.” He gestures downward. “Everything will be fine.” They make no move to join the other souls, though, and after a moment he gives up and extends a hand. “Here. Tell me what’s wrong.” He takes a moment to be relieved that for all its odd behavior, the sea around him isn’t truly water.

The soul darts forward and brushes against his fingers, and he gives it the slight nudge it needs to remember how to form a body.

If Kravitz still had lungs, he would have choked when he saw his brother’s face. It had been more than a thousand years now since he died, and he hadn’t seen his siblings for that entire time. He understood – or at least, he tried to. They’d have lived full lives, found new friends and maybe even families, and – he knew he couldn’t cling to them, as much as he missed them. Even when the centuries had passed and he’d known that both of them must be long dead, from old age if Istus had been kind – well, they hadn’t looked for him. He would have known if they had. They were clearly content, wherever in the plane they were, and he’d let them be.

But now Edward is right in front of him, looking desperate, and Kravitz forgets entirely about the unnatural storm above.

“Keetz.” Edward’s voice is ragged. “Keetz, I _died_.” He sounds like he’s still in shock, like his death is still fresh, and Kravitz suddenly wonders if the reason he hasn’t seen Edward is because he’s been wandering Faerun this whole time, lost and not knowing he needed to pass on. Had another of the Raven Queen’s bounty hunters finally sent him on his way? He was going to have to investigate, if She had sent someone else to retrieve his lost brother he was going to want an explanation-

He realizes he’s still staring and composes himself. “Ed, it’s okay. Sometimes souls get lost on their way, but it’s not-”

Edward shakes his head frantically. “No, Keetz, you don’t understand-I wasn’t lost, I was a lich-”

“You _what?!_ ” Kravitz’s form reverts to his skeleton in a burst of darkness. He grabs Edward’s form by the shoulders. “Tell me you’re-”

“I’m not joking, Kravitz this isn’t the time!” Kravitz’s first impulse is to ignore Edward’s protests and shake him until he gets an explanation _why,_ but the agitation in Edward’s voice – and the sound of his own full name – gives him pause.

“Then what is it? So help me Edward, if you don’t get to the point _now_ -”

“It’s Lydia.” Kravitz knows, suddenly, what Edward is going to tell him.

“No. No, Ed, tell me you didn’t-”

“She’s still there, Keetz. I died but unless they killed her too she’s alone on the material plane and I need to-”

Kravitz bristles. “No, you don’t. I do. I have to go find her and bring her back here, where she should have been for the last five hundred years! What the fuck were you thinking? No, don’t answer that, we’re all going to have a long talk when I get back. Where is she?”

* * *

 

Usually Kravitz wouldn’t open a rift while in the Astral Sea. It’s messy and more importantly, it’s far too easy for a soul to slip through behind him, either intentionally or just by being too close to him. He doesn’t know how long it would take him to get out and open a rift in air, though, and he knows he can keep Edward from following him out, if he even tries. His scythe tears a hole through the planes and he passes through on a rush of tar. The rift seals behind him, cutting off the torrent, and he reforms his face to grimace at the feeling of clinging ooze as he looks around.

Lydia’s invisibility poses no problem to his sight, but the sight of her, skeletal and wearing ancient robes and slumped on the ground, feels deeply, intrinsically _wrong_. Kravitz’s anger ebbs, replaced by worry, and he approaches her. She doesn’t even seem to notice him.

He clears his throat. “Lydia.”

It takes a long few seconds for her to react. She looks up slowly, eyes dim.

“Keetz?”

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“What are you doing here? Are you-”

“I came to get you. Edward found me on the Astral Plane, he told me what happened.” A spike of anger flares in his chest again. “You can’t stay here, Lydia. You both should have left this plane – what, five hundred years ago?”

“You died,” Lydia snaps, lurching upright. “You don’t get to lecture me! You died, and you wouldn’t come back when we called you!”

“You shouldn’t have called in the first place! Everyone dies, Lydia, eventually one of us had to go!” It takes a lot of effort to keep his face on, but Kravitz has used his skeleton form in too many pitched battles to let it out – it feels too much like preparing to attack.

“And what, you wanted to be that one? You wanted to die? Because you sure as hell didn’t want to come back-”

“I didn’t even know! I died and suddenly I wasn’t sick anymore and I could do something worthwhile and I had to do _something_ -”

“Well good for you, go ‘do something worthwhile’ somewhere else! My brothers are fucking dead and I’m the only one of us left!” Lydia’s voice cracks on the last few words and she glares at him for a moment before turning away. The energy around her arcs for yards in every direction, and she’s losing shape again.

Kravitz opens his mouth, closes it, sighs quietly. Lydia’s flickering form is a feeling he knows far better than he’d like. The fight goes out of him and he sits down next to her. “It took me decades.”

“What?” She looks over at him, confused.

“Learning to be on my own.” He rests his forearms on his thighs and looks up at her. “For years it had always been us three, and then suddenly I died and got handed a job and it was just me, trying to figure everything out on my own.” He smiles faintly. “The Raven Queen is a good boss, but…well, it takes a while before you start seeing her as approachable.”

“Yes, Keetz, I imagine the goddess of death isn’t exactly warm and friendly.” Lydia’s reaction is automatic, the same dry tone he remembers, but the energy around her has calmed, and he relaxes a little as she slowly lowers herself back to the ground.

“You’d be surprised, actually – but that isn’t the point. The point is…well, it’s been a long time since I died. I’ve been on my own for centuries. Even after I thought you two had passed on, I never heard anything from you.”

Lydia winces. “We never thought of that.”

“No, I didn’t think so.” Kravitz sighs. “But I figured it out eventually. Even if being alone always felt a little bit wrong.”

“We missed you, Keetz. The whole time,” Lydia says softly. She puts a skeletal hand on his shoulder in a gesture at once familiar and foreign. The comfort it brings, though, is just the same as it always was.

“I know.” They both fall silent for several minutes, until he finally breaks it again. “Ed must be waiting for us, you know,” Kravitz remarks.

Lydia finally cracks a real smile. “I guess we should go, then, huh? You know how he gets, that never improved.” She rises, and Kravitz follows suit.

“Of course it didn’t, we are talking about Ed, after all.”

She chuckles. “Lead the way, reaper boy.”

Kravitz snorts. Then he takes his scythe in hand, tears a hole to a plane that seems calmer now, and he brings his sister home.

**Author's Note:**

> [writes about kravitz and his siblings reuniting and making up while canon kravitz drowns for another two weeks]this is fine


End file.
